We went to see this last week. It’s surprisingly good — and the theater was surprisingly packed for it, even as early as we got there. They even managed to work Soundwave into the story well, something I didn’t think would be possible. (I don’t think they ever mentioned his name, but he’s an integral part of the entire thing.)
We’ll definitely be picking this up when it comes out on DVD.
(Oh, but I won’t be changing my middle name to Megatron.)
Well, we’ve had our Roomba for over a month now, and I know the question that’s on everyone’s mind right now: how well does it work? It’s time to answer that.
It. Is. Freakin’. Awesome.
It’s still picking up a TON of stuff every time we run it, which we’re doing every few days now. It’s not perfect, but it gets in places that no other vacuum cleaner could (like under beds), and it cleans rugs better than any vacuum that I’ve ever used. Our house looks a LOT better since we started using it regularly… I never realized just how crappy our cheap upright vacuum really was until this one had a go at our carpets.
It’s not much in the AI department, but it’s smart enough. 🙂
When I got my wireless networking operating under Linux a few days ago, I was very surprised to find that I had a small but constant amount of inbound traffic on it whenever I used it, measuring 4K to 6K a second. Changing to different channels made no difference. I’d never seen this under Windows, on any of the machines that I used wireless with (including this one), but I figured that could be due to the differences between the Windows and Linux drivers — that it was always there and I just wasn’t able to see it before. The router didn’t report any additional devices connected, so I thought nothing further of it.
I’d been using a Netgear RangeMax WPN824, an 802.11g router, for maybe the last year and a half. It did the job and did it fairly well, but I had need of a router for another location, so I decided to pick up a new one for the office and move the Netgear one to a new home.
After some research, I picked up the D-Link DIR-655 yesterday. It has draft 802.11n/g/b wireless instead of only g and b, gigabit wired Ethernet in place of the Netgear’s 10/100, and several other features that sounded interesting, plus it had gotten rave reviews (from both users and experts) just about everywhere. And to my surprise and delight, it even had explicit instructions for setting it up from Linux — most hardware manufacturers don’t even acknowledge the existence of anything other than Windows and Mac, so it was quite nice to see Tux sitting next to the Mac Finder icon in the documentation.
I set it up with almost exactly the same settings as the Netgear one, the only real difference being that the SSID had one character added. But despite this, to my shock, my Linux machine doesn’t show the constant 4K-6K incoming anymore!
That leads me to wonder whether the incoming data was a targeted attack, perhaps aimed at trying to break through the WPA encryption. I can’t imagine why else the traffic would vanish when I changed the SSID, unless some other network was trying to use the same SSID (not impossible, but unlikely bordering on ludicrous). Or maybe that it wasn’t network traffic at all, but background radiation that was being misinterpreted by the Netgear box. We’ll see how things go when I install it at the new location.
GoddessJ sent me a link to a review of the iPhone that finally said aloud the things that I’ve been thinking for the past few weeks.
(Warning: if you’re an iPhone phanboi, or an Apple lover, this article will tick you off. The rest of the world — all six of us — will probably find it amusing though.)
I love encryption. As a kid, the occasional “secret decoder ring” I’d get out of a box of cereal or Cracker Jacks was a treasure worthy of King Tut himself. In my high-school years I studied how to make (and break) ciphers on paper, and I went on to study computer encryption as well — two of the software products that I wrote for my previous company were based on various forms of encryption, and one of them is still in high demand in the corporate world. Most of my computer data is protected by different forms of encryption too, so I have little to worry about if a thief manages to make off with my hardware or a backup disk, or if one of my neighbor’s kids decides to try snooping on my wireless network traffic.
There were still a few gaps in my encryption defenses though, gaps that I was a little nervous about. I’m not precisely paranoid, because people really are out to get me — and they’re after you too. They want access to your bank accounts, your credit card numbers, and your computer, and that’s just for starters. So I’ve been working on plugging a couple of those gaps. Continue reading ‘The OS Wars II: Paranoia for the Masses’ »
As featured in British author Peter F. Hamilton’s A Quantum Murder and the movie Paycheck, the technology for wiping specific memories is on it’s way to reality. This could be a very good thing, in some cases.
Here’s something you don’t hear about every day.
Make Instant Hot Ice, or A Candle That Won’t Go Out. Tie a Knot That Can’t Be Untied, and see what happens when you Pour a Soda Under Water. It’s all pretty neat.